POPE BENEDICT XVI: THE NAZI YEARS; Few See Taint in Service By Pope in Hitler Youth

MUNICH, April 20 - The day after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, some headlines were already drawing attention to a supposedly dark moment in his past, when the first German pope in 482 years was briefly a member of the Hitler Youth.

"White Smoke, Black Past," was the headline Wednesday in Israel's Yediot Aharonot. "From Hitler Youth to the Vatican," was the way The Guardian put it. Even before his election as pope on Tuesday, The London Sunday Times carried an article with the headline, "Papal Hopeful Is a Former Hitler Youth."

Does Benedict XVI harbor a secret past, which includes sympathy for the Nazis? That would seem to be the question implied by those headlines, which were echoed in many private conversations.

The answer to that question, at least according to available evidence, is no.

It is well established, and readily acknowledged by the pope in his autobiography, that for a time in 1941 and 1942, Joseph Ratzinger, then a teenager, was in the Nazi Party's main organization for indoctrinating young people.

Enrollment in the Hitler Youth was mandatory for any high school age student. After that, he served for a time in an antiaircraft unit that guarded a BMW plant outside Munich -- and there are photographs that show the young Ratzinger in the paramilitary uniform of what were called the flak units, composed of under-age soldiers assigned to antiaircraft guns.

But historians and Jewish groups agree that the pope's wartime record, which was very common to young men of his generation, has little if any significance today and certainly suggests no sympathy for the Nazis, then or now.

It is true that by an accident of history, Benedict XVI is a pope who once wore a Wehrmacht uniform. But as chief adviser to Pope John Paul II in matters of doctrine, he was, far more importantly, a central figure in one of the late pope's most highly publicized gestures -- apologizing for the role that Catholics played in the Holocaust.

"Everybody was in the Hitler Youth," Olaf Blaschke, a specialist on modern church history from Trier University, said in a telephone interview. "Some very strong Catholics didn't go to the Hitler Youth, that's true. But it was sort of mandatory, difficult to evade. And those people who were in the Hitler Youth and were indoctrinated by those ideologies were the very people who later on built the Federal Republic of Germany and fought against every type of totalitarianism."

Other examples of people who belonged to the Hitler Youth were the novelist Günter Grass and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, highly respected intellectual pillars of German democracy, Mr. Blaschke said.

In some ways, there is a striking similarity between the early years of Joseph Ratzinger and those of Karol Wojtyla, the Polish boy, five years older, who became Pope John Paul II. Each grew up in a small town in Central Europe near the mountains; each experienced the Nazi years, and each turned to a deep Catholic faith at least partly in response to what he had experienced.

Throughout his career as priest, bishop and pope, John Paul II spoke about the Jewish friends he had in Wadowice, his hometown in southern Poland, and his memory of their persecutions seems to have motivated him at least in large part to produce the 1998 Encyclical "We Remember," in which he expressed contrition for the failure of Catholics to offer more protection to Jews and for the fact that some took part in their persecution.

As archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Ratzinger said very little about the war or the Jews, and he does not seem to have uttered ringing public denunciations of anti-Semitism. But as the right-hand man to John Paul, he was widely assumed to have played a major role in drafting "We Remember," and he was clearly involved in other path-breaking gestures the pope made toward reconciliation with Jews, including praying in a synagogue.

"It cannot be denied," he said last year, in a statement that mirrored the main concept of "We Remember," "that a certain insufficient resistance by Christians to this atrocity is explained by the anti-Judaism present in the soul of more than a few Christians."

Traunstein, the market town where Pope Benedict XVI spent most of his youth, was typical of the conservative Bavarian villages where the Nazi Party was able to make early inroads in the 1920's.

But it underwent a transformation in the 1930's from an enthusiastic embrace of the Nazis to a more fraught relationship.

The key change, according to Gerd Evers, a local historian, was the party's increasingly anticlerical oratory, which offended the deeply Catholic population. At one point in the town, some 2,000 villagers signed a petition protesting a Nazi order to remove crucifixes from the schoolrooms, and, indeed, the Nazis withdrew the order.

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By 1941, when the young Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth, the Nazi Party had become an overweening force. The director of St. Michael, a Catholic-run boarding school in Traunstein that Joseph Ratzinger attended, began automatically enrolling his students in the group in 1939, according to Mr. Evers.

The Rev. Thomas Frauenlob, the school's current director, said Cardinal Ratzinger shunned Nazi ideology because it conflicted with his Christian faith. "He had a strong belief in Christ, which helped him distinguish between good and evil," Father Frauenlob said.

The Ratzinger family itself was also strongly anti-Nazi, according to Cardinal Ratzinger's biographer, John L. Allen Jr., which is the reason Joseph's father was demoted as a policeman, and why he moved his family several times in the war years. According to some people in Joseph Ratzinger's birthplace, Marktl am Inn, his father clashed with local Nazi officials.

"When the Hitler Youth was established, my brother was forced to become a member," Cardinal Ratzinger said in an interview in 1997. "I was still too young, but later, when I entered the seminary, I also joined. But as soon as I had left the seminary, I never went to see them again. And this was difficult, because in order to be entitled to get a discount on the tuition fee, which I urgently needed, one had to prove that one was a member of the Hitler Youth."

In 1943, according to Mr. Allen's biography, Joseph Ratzinger was drafted into an antiaircraft group. He was sent for a short time to the Austrian-Hungarian border to set tank traps, and deserted after being shipped back to Bavaria.

After the war, he entered a seminary near Munich to study for the priesthood, beginning his career in the church. "Ratzinger's views on truth and freedom were forged in the crucible of World War II," Mr. Allen writes, drawing a link to his later theological conservatism.

"Under Hitler, Ratzinger says, he watched the Nazis twist and distort the truth. Their lies about Jews, about genetics, were more than academic exercises. People died by the millions because of them.

"The church's service to society, Ratzinger concluded, is to stand for absolute truths that function as boundary markers. Move about within these limits, but outside them lies disaster."

Given his standing as a staunch conservative, and his active hostility to liberal trends in the church, Cardinal Ratzinger earned some unflattering epithets in the German press -- "Panzer cardinal" being the most common of them.

But, unlike some Germans of the generation a few years older than his, he has nothing in his past to suggest that he has kept some former Nazi sympathy secret.

Indeed, in choosing to go to a seminary and certainly in deserting from the army, the future pope, then still only a teenager, was clearly not acting like a Nazi enthusiast.

"There is no sign that he was in any way attracted to Nazism," Siegfried Wiedenhofer, a professor of dogmatics at Frankfurt University and a longtime friend of Pope Benedict XVI. "The opposite is the case."

Many Jewish figures have praised the new pope, citing in particular his contribution to Catholic-Jewish reconciliation.

"He's never denied the past, never hid it," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "His whole life is an open book of sensitivity against bigotry and anti-Semitism." The Jerusalem Post, in an editorial Tuesday, explained why it was not concerned. "As for the Hitler Youth issue, not even Yad Vashem has considered it worthy of further investigation," it said, referring to the Holocaust Memorial and research center in Jerusalem. "Why should we?"

This article was reported by Richard Bernstein in Munich and Mark Landler in Traunstein.